Ethiopia’s Genzebe Dibaba[1] won by 25 seconds at the Carlsbad 5000 in California on Sunday, but her time of 14:48 fell just short of her stated goal of breaking Meseret Defar’s world 5K road record of 14:46.

Lawi Lalang, a Kenyan who attended the University of Arizona, won the relatively slow and sometimes windy men’s race in 13:32. Lalang's training partner Bernard Lagat[2] took third in 13:40 to set a new masters road world record. The previous masters mark was 13:55, set by John Campbell of New Zealand in 1991.

Dibaba has the indoor 5000-meter world record of 14:18.86, so her shot at Defar’s road record seemed highly realistic. After only the second road race of her career, Dibaba said, “I did not go out fast enough. I wasn’t looking at the times or my splits until the last minute.”

Fellow Ethiopians Gelete Burka (15:13) and Wude Yimer (15:18) were second and third. The top American woman was Sarah Brown in eighth in 15:48.

Wilson Too of Kenya, in 13:35, was the men’s runner-up, between winner Lalang and third-place Lagat. Diego Estrada, the 2015 USA Half Marathon champion, was sixth in 13:56.

Lagat failed in his bid to break Marc Davis' American road 5K record of 13:24, but said afterward, “Running this fast at 40, it is not bad at all.” In 2014, he ran 13:18 at Carlsbad to apparently break Davis' record, but the course was remeasured and found to be slightly short.